by Eric Flint
Drugeth didn't know which type of airplane this was, but it couldn't have capabilities that were any better. In fact, if he was right in his guess about the object he could see under the craft's body, it had only had two bombs to begin with. He'd seen the bomb they'd dropped, although he hadn't spotted where it came from. But he was pretty sure it must have been the companion of the object he could see now.
As they came over the wagon again, moving as slowly as Lannie dared, they weren't going any faster than a car breaking the speed limit on an interstate highway. And Lannie had the plane not more than forty feet off the ground.
So, since he also obeyed Denise when she told him to fly on the side where she could see what was happening, she got a very good look at the second cavalryman when he looked up as they passed by. Glaring in fury and shaking his fist at them.
Except it wasn't a cavalryman and it wasn't a he.
"Jesus H. Christ!" Denise exploded. "We just bombed Noelle and Eddie!"
"Huh?" said Lannie, his mouth gaping.
"Well, shit!" screeched Keenan from the back. "Well, shit!"
"I'll kill 'em," Noelle hissed, as she went back to tending Eddie. Luckily—by now, she'd unfastened the cuirass—he didn't seem to have been wounded by the bomb itself or any of the splinters it had sent flying from the wagon when it exploded. At least, she couldn't see any blood anywhere, that she thought was any of Eddie's own. He did have some blood on one of his trouser legs, but she was pretty sure that came from his horse. One of the splinters or maybe a part of the bomb casing had torn a huge wound in the horse's belly. It had thrown Eddie when it fell to the ground. Kicked him in the head, too, in the course of thrashing about afterward, judging from the condition of his helmet.
At least, she didn't think that big a dent in a sturdy helmet could have been caused by his fall. The meadow had hardly any rocks in it.
Eddie's eyes were open, but he seemed dazed. Might have a concussion. And a broken left arm, from the looks of things.
Gingerly, she started unfastening his sleeve. Eddie moaned a little, but she got it peeled back enough to check its condition.
A broken forearm, sure enough. Noelle had broken her own forearm as a kid, falling out of a tree. She could remember insisting to her mother all the way to the hospital that the arm wasn't really broken. Just bent a little, that's all.
But it wasn't a compound fracture, and the break was obviously well below the elbow. Give it a few weeks, properly splinted, and it would heal as good as new.
The relief allowed her fury to resurge. She looked up, tracking the plane from its sound, so she could shake her fist at them again. The stupid bastards!
But when she spotted the plane, the gesture turned into a frantic wave.
"You stupid bastards! Watch out!"
The cramped interior of the cockpit seemed like bedlam to Denise.
"Jesus, Lannie, you bombed my sister! You bombed my sister!" Keenan kept screeching, in blithe disregard for the fact that he'd been the one who'd actually released the weapon.
Naturally, Lannie's response was to shift the blame himself. "She told me to do it! She told me to do it!" was his contribution.
"Shut up, both of you!" was Denise's own, trying to settle them down.
In retrospect, she'd admit to her best friend Minnie—nobody else—that she probably should have kept concentrating on the "navigating" side of the business.
Eventually, it did occur to her that she ought to see where they were going.
"Lannie!" she screeched.
"Fascinating," murmured Janos. He'd always wondered how fragile the devices were. Now, seeing one of the plane's wings partly-shredded by its impact with a mere tree limb—a large tree, granted—his longstanding guess was confirmed.
As was his determination to remain a cavalryman. Say what you would about the stupid beasts, horses were rather sturdy. Nor did they move at ridiculous speeds, nor did they keep a rider more than a few feet from the ground.
"Jesus, Lannie, you wrecked the plane! You wrecked the plane!" was Keenan's current contribution, even more useless than the last.
"Shut the fuck up!" Denise hollered. "Just concentrate, Lannie. You can do it."
Fortunately, Lannie had left off his own shouting. Now that he was in a crisis, his pilot's instincts had taken over.
"We're going in, guys," he said. "Can't do anything else."
Even to Denise, it was obvious from the damage suffered by the wing on her side that he was right. "You can do it, Lannie," she said calmly. "And we got a big wide meadow here."
Lannie's grin was as thin as a grin could get, but she was relieved to see it. "Just better hope we don't hit a gopher hole. Got no way to retract the landing gear."
"There aren't any gophers in Europe," she said, in as reassuring a tone as she could manage.
"Yeah, that's right," chimed in Keenan from the back. "No ground hogs, neither." Thankfully, he'd left off the screeching.
Denise saw no reason to voice aloud her firm conviction that there were probable umpteen thousand things that could produce holes in a meadow. All but two of which did exist in Europe.
They'd be coming down in a few seconds. Lannie did have the plane more or less under control. Hopefully it'd be a crash landing they could walk away from, if nothing caught fire or—
"Drop the other bomb, Keenan!"
"Huh?"
"Drop the fucking bomb!"
"Oh. Yeah."
Watching, Janos didn't wonder for more than an instant why the up-timers had committed the seemingly pointless act of bombing an empty patch of meadow. Judging from the way the first bomb had exploded, the device had been detonated by a contact fuse, probably armed by the act of releasing it. Not the sort of thing any sane man wants to be sitting atop when he tries to crash an aircraft as gently as possible.
The plane came down. And confirmed once again Janos' long-standing conviction that plans and schemes and plots are just naturally prone to crashing.
"Oh, hell," said Noelle. At first, she'd thought that the plane had come down safely. Almost as if it were landing on a proper airfield. Then—one of the wheels must have hit an unseen obstruction—she saw the still undamaged wing dip sharply and strike the ground. The plane skewed around, tipped up on its nose—please God, don't let that propeller come apart in pieces and chew anybody up—and seemed to balance precariously for a moment.
Then it looked as if the plane just more or less disintegrated into its component parts. The newly-damaged wing broke off, the fuselage tipped and rolled, and the plane flopped down on its side. Most of the other wing broke off, as did part of the tail assembly when it hit.
Still . . .
There was no explosion. No flames. People had walked away from car crashes worse than that.
"Just wait for me, Eddie," she said. "And don't move. Your arm's busted."
She got on her horse and headed for the crash site.
Janos pointed to the enemy cavalryman still on the ground by the remains of the wagon.
"Gardiner, see to him. Keep him under guard, that's all. Do him no harm unless he attacks you. Gage, follow me."
He set off after the other cavalryman, toward the downed plane.
"What are we going to do?" asked Gage, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the cantering horses.
"Seize them and take them with us, any who survived. What else can we do? I don't think this is a reconnaissance patrol from a larger force following them. They wouldn't have sent just two men for that purpose. I'm not certain, but I think these are operating alone. If we let any of them go—and there's at least one of them in good condition—they'll take the alarm to Hof. Two bomb explosions, a crashed warcraft, even the sorriest garrison in Creation will react to that."
Gage was silent for a moment. Then, as Janos expected, he raised the other obvious alternative.
"We could kill them."
"Oh, splendid," said Janos. "Just what Austria needs. Half our army is facing Wallenste
in on the north, most of the rest is facing the Turks to the south—and we ignite a new war by committing a pointless massacre."
"It was a thought," said Gage mildly. "Probably not a good one, I admit."
Drugeth's irritation with the Englishman was only momentary. He'd considered that solution himself. But he still had hopes they could complete this adventure without the sort of drastic measures that would trigger off an explosive reaction from the USE.
Firmly, he ignored his own hard-gained wisdom on the subjects of plans and their likely outcomes.
Chapter 10. The Sword
By the time Denise got done hauling Lannie out of the wreck, she was exhausted. Getting Keenan out hadn't been too bad, even though he'd been in the cramped rear of the cockpit. But Keenan had just been dazed and bruised, not pinned by some of the equipment that had been broken loose and all but completely unconscious.
Denise was strong for a girl her age and build, but the fact remained that the age was almost-sixteen and while the build was great for making girls jealous and boys drool—not that she appreciated either one—it wasn't that good for frantically trying to free a normal-sized man from wreckage and haul him out by bodily force. Not for the first time in her life, she wished she'd inherited more of her dad's bulk and muscle and less of her mother's appearance.
But, finally, it was done. Probably hadn't taken more than a few minutes, actually. With the last of her strength, she lowered Lannie onto the ground and half-spilled herself out of the fuselage. Fortunately, the meadow was pretty soft ground. On her hands and knees, she saw that Keenan was sitting up and holding his head. He was groaning a little, but so far as she could tell he didn't really seem to be hurt.
In the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a pair of legs. Looking over, she saw Noelle, with a very strained expression on her face.
"Hey, look," she said defensively, "I'm sorry. We didn't know it was you."
Belatedly, she realized that Noelle wasn't actually looking at her. She was looking over Denise's head at something off to the side.
Denise swiveled, flopping onto her side in the process, and propped herself up on one elbow.
"Oh, great."
The something Noelle had been staring out turned out to be two men, with two horses not far away behind them.
Both down-timers, obviously. Neither of them was smiling—hey, no kidding—so she couldn't see their teeth. That was usually the simplest indication, especially with a man somewhere in middle age like the one holding the very nasty looking and oh-so-very-up-time pump action shotgun, if not the younger one who was standing a little closer with a sword in his hand.
But it didn't matter. Leaving aside the clothes they were wearing and the hair styles, she would have known just looking at the way the young one held the sword. She didn't know any up-timer who held a sword like that. Maybe somebody like Harry Lefferts did, by now, with all of his escapades. But Denise hadn't seen much of Harry in a long time, and on the few occasions she had seen him Harry had been carousing in one of Grantville's taverns with the wine, women and song that seemed to accompany him like pilot fish did a shark. The wine and women, with complete ease, the singing a whole lot less so since Harry had a nice natural voice and could even carry a tune but somewhere along the way had picked up the silly conviction that he was one of those old-style Irish tenors who could make nasal sound good but he couldn't.
Her thoughts were veering all over the place, she realized, and she commanded them back to attention.
Concentrate on the fucking sword, idiot.
The damn thing didn't look any better when she did. This wasn't one of those fancy swords that a lot of down-time noblemen and wannabe noblemen carried about when they were trying to look impressive. Pretty, lots of decorations—even jewels, if they were rich enough—and looking as if they'd seen as much actual use as the kind of fancy china that people kept in a cabinet and didn't eat off of except once in a blue moon.
No, this sword looked like her mother's favorite kitchen knife, allowing for a drastic increase in size. Solid, plain, sharp as a razor and so often honed that the blade wasn't a completely straight line anymore. And the bastard was holding it just the way her mother did, too—or the way her dad held a welding torch or a tool he was using to work on one of his bikes.
Casually. The way no up-timer except maybe a few wild-ass screwballs like Harry could possibly hold a sword. The man wasn't flourishing it, wasn't brandishing it—didn't, really, even seem more than vaguely aware that he had it in his hand in the first place. A weapon so familiar and comfortable that it was just any other tool, used more by instinct than conscious thought.
Some tools chopped onions, some tools chopped metal, and this one wasn't any different except it chopped off heads and limbs and from the look of the miserable son-of-a-bitch any part of a human body he felt like chopping off.
She tore her eyes away from the sword and looked higher up, at the man's face. For a moment—one wild moment—she almost burst into laughter.
He looked for all the world like a rock star!
Dammit, it was true. Good-looking, in that sort of older-than-he-really-was way that indicated either dissipation or too much familiarity with the wicked ways of men—music recording executives in the case of rock stars; probably not in this guy's—and judging from the easy athleticism of his stance he didn't seem dissipated in the least, so scratch that theory.
Long, curly, dark hair. Flowing fucking locks, fer chrissake. A flaring mustache and a neatly trimmed full beard that'd looked silly on almost anybody except genu-ine rock stars and guys who could hold a sword like that.
Just to complete the picture, soulful brown eyes. The kind of eyes with which rock stars sang to the world of their sorrow at the faithlessness of women and guys like this bastard looked down upon the corpses they left behind.
"Well, fuck," she said. "Just what it needed to make the day complete."
In German, she added: "And who are you?"
The swordsman had been staring back at Noelle the whole time Denise had been assessing him. Now he looked down at her.
"My name is Janos Drugeth. From the family with the estates in Humenné. Homonna, as we Hungarians would call it. I am a cavalry officer in the service of the Austrian emperor."
Hungarian. Denise didn't know much about Hungarians, but she knew they liked to call themselves "Magyars" because they were descended from a tribe of nomadic conquerors. Like some biker gangs liked to call themselves "the Huns."
Perfect. Just perfect.
To her surprise, he added: "We may speak in English, if you prefer."
His English was good, too, if heavily accented.
Noelle stood very straight. "My name is Noelle Stull. I am an official for the USE government. Well, the State of Thuringia-Franconia. And I—me and my partner, Eddie Junker, over there—"
She pointed toward the demolished wagon, some distance away. "—are in pursuit of the criminals whom we believed to have been in possession of that vehicle. Please either assist us in that task or, at the very least, do not impede us in our duty."
Bold as brass. Mentally, Denise doffed her hat in salute. Not that she ever wore a hat.
The Drugeth fellow gave Noelle a sorrowful smile. "I will not dispute your characterization of the individuals in question. But I am afraid I cannot respond as you wish to either of your requests. Not only may I not assist you, I am afraid I shall have to detain you myself."
He slid the sword back into its scabbard. The motion was swift, easy, practiced. He hadn't even looked at the sword and scabbard as he did it, just letting his left thumb and forefinger guide the blade into the opening. The fact that he'd chosen to sheathe the weapon while explaining what he was going to do just emphasized his complete confidence that nobody would think to dispute the matter.
Which . . .
In point of fact, nobody would. Sure as hell not Denise. That sword could come out just as quickly and smoothly as it went in. And leaving that a
side, the other guy still had the shotgun in his hands and didn't seem to be in the least inclined to emulate his leader's example and put it away. True, he didn't have the barrel pointed at anybody, but it was obvious he could in a split-second. That was just good gun-handling, not carelessness.
He didn't look like a rock star, either. More like a record producer. Shoot you as quick as he'd shell out payola or cheat singers out of their royalties.
To Denise's alarm, she saw that Noelle's hand had moved to the vicinity of her holster.
That was crazy. First, that was no quick-draw holster. It was a safe-and-sound holster with a flap, and the flap was buckled. By the time Noelle got the pistol out, the older guy with the shotgun could kill them all. Assuming the Hungarian nomad-cum-rock-star hadn't sliced them up already.
